I had big ambitions in the fourth grade. I wanted to be a novelist. I was a faithful customer of the Scholastic Book Service and dreamed that one day I would see my name in one of their fliers. I wanted to write a book like Lester Del Ray's "Tunnel Through Time", a kids science fiction novel about a couple of fourteen year old boys who are zapped into the age of dinosaurs by their research physicist fathers.
I had three friends who were interested in the project, Steve Brandenhorst, Billy Shannon, and Billy Cole. I divided up the responsibilities between us: twenty chapters, four people: five chapters apiece, alternating. Of course, I would take the important opening chapter that would explain how the four of us fell through a time warp that sent us to the Mesozoic era. And by the way, yes, I did go around saying things like “Mesozoic era”, and I remember agonizing over whether to set the thing in the Jurassic or Cretaceous period.
I kept the pages in a pocket folder with a bald eagle on the front. Many pages had grape Kool-Aid stains. I ended up doing almost all of the writing. Steve wrote one chapter that lasted one page. It told of how the four of us went on a walk through the woods behind his house and ended up in Dinosaurland. We fought and killed a dinosaur and then proceeded to eat it with Miracle Whip. What on earth was Dinosaurland? Where did we get Miracle Whip in the Mesozoic? I reedited his manuscript to explain these things. I didn’t criticize his work to his face, though. I liked Steve a lot and wanted him to be my best friend. He was a respected kickball player and very cool.
On the other hand, Billy Shannon and Billy Cole were so nerdy they made me look cool. Shannon wrote half a page that was mostly about King Tut and had no more than tangential application to the story that we were supposed to be writing. I furiously wrote a frame to try and explain Billy Shannon's King Tut and what Egyptians were doing in the Cretaceous. Billy Cole kept talking about what he was going to write but never put anything down on paper. I gave up on him and wrote his chapter myself, enjoying the challenge of trying to write in someone else’s style.
One day I was working some of this out in class, when teacher's kid and all around snotty brat Stephanie Cottongin raised her hand and cried out "Matthew's not doing his worksheet...he's writing a book about dinosaurs..." How she spat out that last word. It’s not like I was playing paper football or making spitwads. The worksheet in question was some matching game...I was writing a great novel! Still I had to stay in during recess and clean erasers.
It was worth it.. In the end I came away with a novel, thirty type written pages with half a dozen illustrations by my sister’s boyfriend (who did a great job, even if he did seem to confuse dinosaurs with dragons). I would always have the knowledge that I had taken something that existed only in my mind and had turned it into something tangible. The word made flesh.
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